America’s Best Worst Politicians

From Oregon to Florida and from California to New York, an Independence Day look at the bottom feeders of public office.

King George III was “a Tyrant...
unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the
Declaration of Independence exactly 238 years ago this week.

Tommy had it right.

Ever since then, Americans have been calling out their
leaders. “Tyrant” was just the start. We’ve moved on to crook (Nixon),
liar (Clinton), and moron (Dubya).

Whether or not you agree with the peanut gallery, there’s
no denying that such written assaults on public honchos are as American
as baseball, apple pie, and the iPhone.

So on this Independence Day, those closest to American
politics—50 writers and editors of the alternative press from across
the land, including WW—have combined their collective genius.
They’ve named 53 of the nation’s worst elected leaders from 23 of the
largest states and the District of Columbia, then separated them into
five categories: hatemongers, sleazeballs, blowhards, users and boozers,
and horn dogs.

And there’s more than just the usual stodgy Washington
losers. Try Colorado sheriff Terry Maketa, who allegedly had sex with
not one, not two, but three underlings and then lied about it. Or check
out Idaho Senate GOP leader John McGee, who stole and crashed an SUV,
admitted to drinking too much, and went to jail. Upon returning to the
statehouse, he was accused of groping a female staffer.

Want a little old-school corruption? Florida’s governor,
Rick Scott, who will be up for re-election soon, founded a health-care
empire that was whacked with the largest Medicare fraud fine in U.S.
history: $1.7 billion for stealing from the feds. There’s also
Washington, D.C. council member Michael Brown, who once accepted
$200,000 to stay out of an election and was later indicted after
grabbing at a cash-stuffed duffel bag offered by an undercover FBI
agent. And there are two politicians from Oregon. (See the section on "Blowhards.")

Of course, there are big names here too. South Carolina’s “Luv Guv” Terry Sanford made the list. So did Texas’ Green Eggs and Ham filibusterer Ted Cruz and Minnesota loon Michele Bachmann. Even pol wannabe Donald Trump snuck in a side door..

So before you head out for the fireworks or swig some American brew, consider this hall of shame. — Chuck Strouse, Miami New Times

Hatemonger

Arkansas State Senator Jason Rapert

Jason Rapert is the Elmer Gantry of the Arkansas
Legislature — a Brush Arbor Baptist preacher, bluegrass fiddler, and
proprietor of a putative African missionary effort that specializes in
countries where homosexuality is a crime.

The Republican from Bigelow’s outrage at the “radical
homosexual lobby” and “elitist judges” over the march of marriage
equality knows no bounds. On his passion meter, that subject is up there
with his views on President Obama (he wants him impeached), fracking
(it’s seriously good), and abortion (uh-uh). On that last issue, Rapert
tried to pass a six-week abortion limit but settled for 12; it was
immediately invalidated by a Republican federal judge who, unlike
Rapert, still believes Roe v. Wade guides federal law.

The judge did keep in place a mandatory ultrasound for
women, which will mean an invasive vaginal probe in some cases. Rapert
believes the United States, its laws, and its people should be governed
by God’s commandments. And it’s Rapert’s interpretation of the
commandments, not those of different religious persuasions, that count. —
Max Brantley, Arkansas Times

Hatemonger

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer

Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore

In 2010, Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, affixed her
signature to the infamous, immigrant-bashing legislation called Senate
Bill 1070 and rode a wave of xenophobia to electoral triumph, a book
deal, conservative accolades, and liberal opprobrium. She did this
despite massive goofs such as claiming that headless bodies were
routinely found in the Arizona desert, blanking for several seconds
during a TV debate with her gubernatorial rivals, and claiming her dad
died fighting the Nazis when he actually worked in a munitions depot
during World War II and died ten years after the war ended.

But who cares about that when there are “Messcans” to
whoop on? Wahoo! Brewer spent millions in donations on appeals to a U.S.
district court’s injunction against most of 1070. Then, in 2012, the
U.S. Supreme Court overthrew a large part of the statute as
unconstitutional. Still, it had its intended effect. More than 200,000
Hispanics fled the state because of 1070 and other anti-immigrant laws,
according to one estimate. They took their purchasing power with them to
other states, making Arizona’s recession even worse.

Brewer still plays the race card, even as a lame duck with
zero political prospects. For instance, she stubbornly refuses to
relent on her executive order denying driver’s licenses to so-called
DREAMers who qualify for deferred action under a federal plan.

Recently, the governor has tried softening her image by
pushing through a Medicaid expansion and overhauling Arizona’s inept
Child Protective Services. Nevertheless, her political gravestone is
destined to read, “Signed SB 1070.” — Stephen Lemons, Phoenix New Times

Hatemonger

Arizona State Representative John Kavanagh

Republican state Representative John Kavanagh, chairman of
the House Appropriations Committee, is a smart, funny, shameless guy.
How shameless is he? He’s so shameless he can introduce legislation that
would help cops crack down on panhandling and still rationalize taking
free trips to China and Azerbaijan, gifted to him because he’s a
legislator.

Hey, what’s the good of being a lawmaker without a few
perks? But the shamelessness doesn’t stop there. He also tried giving
the private prison company GEO Group $1 million of state money during a
time of scarce resources and great need among state agencies. Why?
Kavanagh claimed GEO had given the state a sweet deal in the past and
needed the dough — you know, more than schools and sick people and roads
and all of that unnecessary stuff.

Then there’s his pandering to the far right, like his
transgender-phobic “bathroom bill,” which, in its initial form, would
have made it a felony for a tranny to use the “wrong” bathroom. That’s
right — show your ID before you pee. No surprise that Kavanagh, an
ex-cop from back East, is also down on the brown and was all for
recalled former state senate president Russell Pearce’s Hispanic-hatin’
Senate Bill 1070, another “show me your papers” law.

The bathroom bill died, after universal outrage cowed the
K-man. However, SB 1070 passed with his assistance. Kavanagh has now
termed out in the state House and is trying to move over to the state
Senate. But he has a primary challenger and a general election
challenger to overcome before he can menace the halls of the Arizona
Capitol yet again. — Stephen Lemons, Phoenix New Times

Hatemonger

U.S. Representative Paul Gosar, Arizona

Congressman Paul Gosar stood beside flaming racist Cliven
Bundy and Bundy’s band of armed militia members ready to battle the
Bureau of Land Management in southern Nevada — all over the rancher’s
refusal to pay his bills.

But Gosar’s opportunistic move (a publicity stunt to score points with his militia-minded constituency) blew up in his face.

Bundy’s public pontification on how African-Americans were
perhaps better off under slavery, along with his radical, violent
rhetoric, was enough to convince several politicians who had aligned
themselves with the rancher to issue statements blasting his atrocious
views.

But not Gosar—at least not that anybody can tell from
his website. Calls to his office to see if the congressman publicly
renounced his Nevada pal weren’t returned.

Gosar’s hypocrisy is striking. When he offers thoughts
about immigration, he blusters about America being “a nation of laws”
and how all immigrants must “play by the rules and earn their way
honestly.”

Apparently, obeying the law doesn’t apply to his
rogue-rancher buddy, who was warned repeatedly about allowing his cattle
to graze on restricted land and owes the feds about $1 million in
unpaid grazing fees.

Thing is, Gosar is lucky to have his congressional seat, to which he was re-elected after Phoenix New Times
reported that the leader in the race, border hawk Pinal County Sheriff
Paul Babeu, had been accused by his Mexican national ex-boyfriend of
threatening to have him deported. — Monica Alonzo, Phoenix New Times

Hatemonger

Marionville Mayor Dan Clevenger, Missouri

On April 13, former KKK member Frazier Glenn Cross fatally
shot three people outside a Jewish community center and a Jewish
retirement home in a Kansas City suburb. After his arrest, a handcuffed
Cross yelled, “Heil Hitler!” from the back of a police car. Why
anyone, much less a public figure, would subsequently speak in support
of a racist, homicidal maniac is beyond comprehension, but Marionville
Mayor Dan Clevenger did just that.

He told a local ABC affiliate reporter that, though he
believed Cross should be executed, he also “kind of agreed” with, well,
you know, racism. “There are some things that are going on in this
country that are destroying us. We’ve got a false economy, and it’s —
some of those corporations are run by Jews, because the names are
there,” he said. “The people that run the Federal Reserve — they’re
Jewish.” The reporter also discovered a letter to a local newspaper
written by Clevenger in 2004 calling Cross a “friend” and warning
readers that the “Jew-run medical industry... made a few Jews rich by
killin’ us off.”

After the story aired, residents of the southwest Missouri
town demanded Clevenger resign. He initially refused but then relented
after citizens aired their grievances at a packed and raucous city
meeting. Afterward, Clevenger told reporters he was hurt by the town’s
rejection. — Chad Garrison, Riverfront Times

Sleazeball

California State Senator Ron Calderon

In 2011, L.A. Weeklydubbed brothers Ron and
Charles Calderon, then a California state senator and the assembly
majority leader, respectively, the “worst legislators in California” for
authoring “sponsored” laws they didn’t write — then taking serious
money from the special interest groups that actually wrote them.

The Calderons insisted they weren’t selling laws. After
all, of the avalanche of about 1,000 new bills introduced annually in
the state, the San Jose Mercury-News found that 39 percent are
ghostwritten by groups seeking to benefit — environmentalists,
manufacturers, municipalities. They’re successful too: From 2007 to
2008, sponsored bills composed 60 percent of those the governor signed
into law. The Sacramento press corps largely treats “sponsored” bills as
non-news. After all, almost all legislators do it.

But few legislators, we hope, do it like Ron Calderon. In
February, he and a third brother, former assemblyman Tom Calderon, were
indicted for corruption. Ron allegedly took $28,000 in bribes to
preserve a flawed state law that was being milked for millions of
dollars by a corrupt hospital executive. He was also charged with
selling laws after taking $88,000 in bribes from a “film executive” who —
whoops — was an undercover FBI agent. (Ron has been suspended from the
legislature.)

And what of the other Calderon brother, Charles? In mid-May, the Los Angeles Times
editorial board endorsed him for a judgeship. It didn’t mention his
history of taking gobs of cash from those whose custom laws he’d enabled
or the fact that he’d paid his son $40,000 in campaign funds for doing
basically nothing. Voters weren’t about to side with the Times and cheer on Charles. Recently they elected his opponent with 66 percent of the vote. — Jill Stewart, L.A. Weekly

Hatemonger

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel

Josh Mandel parlayed a place on the city council into a
job as a state rep into a third gig that subjects far more people to his
unrivaled brand of idiocy and backroom deals. A few things to know
about him: When he ran against sitting Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown
in 2012 for a chance at another promotion and a whole new zip code to
terrorize, Mandel and his campaign followers were less than virtuous.
Accusing Brown of shipping Buckeye jobs to China, Mandel could not be
bothered with specific examples. “If that’s the level of specificity
you’re looking for, you’re the reporters — you go do the grunt work,” he
replied to journalists who had asked about the allegation.

Then he probably headed out to count freshly minted
dollars pouring in from the Suarez Corporation. That fine workplace has
been in the news since an investigation revealed Suarez founder and
president Benjamin Suarez had directed 21 employees to donate to the
Mandel campaign and other GOP causes — and then promised to reimburse
them with company funds.

Mandel, naturally, is pleading ignorance, but prosecutors
have dug up plenty of correspondence from the Mandel campaign asking for
donations. And the very week all of that was happening, Mandel was
writing letters on Suarez’s behalf for business dealings in California.
That’s embarrassing enough, but it’s nothing compared to this: Mandel’s
cousins penned an open letter blasting the then-senate-candidate for his
opposition to gay marriage and gays openly serving in the military,
saying, “Your discriminatory stance violates the core values of our
family.” — Vince Grzegorek, Cleveland Scene

Hatemonger

Ohio State Representative John Becker

“This is just a personal view. I’m not a medical doctor.”
So says Becker, who, after less than a year in Columbus has introduced a
dozen bills, all of them bat-shittier than the last. His personal,
nonmedical opinion, if you were wondering, pertained to HB 351, a bill
that would have banned health-care providers from covering abortions.
And not just abortions in the sense we all know, but a hazy, very
unscientific view of abortions that would include “drugs or devices used
to prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum.”

And he’s after IUDs, which are proven to be, as Slate pointed out, among the most cost-effective and, ya know, effective forms of birth control.

Becker advocated the impeachment of a federal judge in
Ohio who had overturned part of the state’s same-sex marriage ban. He
also penned an open letter in the wake of gay marriage approval in
Massachusetts advocating a constitutional amendment prohibiting the
practice. (His next best solution was expelling Massachusetts from the
union and removing a star from the flag.)

He has admitted to being a bit of a Don Quixote with his
opinions, though we’re pretty sure Becker has never read Cervantes’
masterpiece. Otherwise, he would have read passages like “When equity
could and should be upheld, do not apply the rigor of the law on the
accused; the reputation of a rigorous judge is no better than a
compassionate one” and then promptly proposed a bill to ban Man of La Mancha. — Vince Grzegorek, Cleveland Scene

Hatemonger

Former U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, South Carolina

For a brief moment, Jim DeMint was a GOP kingmaker. Thanks
to him and his Senate Conservatives Fund, libertarian charlatans such
as Marco Rubio in 2008 — and Rand Paul and Mike Lee in 2010 — won U.S.
Senate seats. But then 2012 rolled around, and DeMint backed Todd
“Legitimate Rape” Akin, Richard “God Wants Rape Babies” Mourdock, and a
host of other troglodyte true-believers, and, well, things didn’t turn
out so well.

So DeMint did what sore losers almost always do — he took
his super PAC home and got a cushy job at the Heritage Foundation with
four years left in his term. Of course, this was just the latest bit of
ass-hattery by the DeMinted One. A notorious homophobe, DeMint once said
he could never vote for a gay president. Even worse, he said gays
shouldn’t be allowed to teach in public schools; the same went for unwed
heterosexual women engaging in premarital sex.

He also characterized African-Americans as government
beneficiaries and stated that only a follower of Judeo-Christian beliefs
could truly be an American. Oh, and on more than one occasion, he said
that all — yes, all — of his fellow Capitol Hill comrades were greedy
bastards on the take. No wonder the House and Senate rejoiced when
DeMint left Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, the people of South Carolina
continue to hail him as a hero. — Chris Haire, Charleston City Paper

Hatemonger

Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield

The Wikipedia page for Knoxville Republican Stacey
Campfield features sections summarizing his years in the Tennessee House
and the Tennessee Senate, followed by a section titled “Other
Controversies.” To understand Campfield is to understand he does not
have legislative efforts tainted by some controversies on the side.
There are his legislative efforts, and then there are other
controversies. He is the controversy.

Campfield outbreaks are recalled by Tennessee political observers like old Friends
reruns. There’s “The One Where Stacey Gets Thrown Out of Congressman
Jimmy Duncan’s Annual Barbecue,” “The One With the Luchador Mask,” “The
One Where Stacey Explains That AIDS Came From ‘One Guy Screwing a
Monkey,’” and “The One Where Stacey Compares
Obamacare to the Holocaust.” Viewers who watched those episodes also
enjoyed the time Campfield proposed cutting payments to families if
their children did poorly in school. But perhaps his legacy achievement —
his middle name could be “As Mentioned on Colbert” — was the
introduction of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that proposed banning any
discussion of homosexuality in schools. In a more recent iteration, it
effectively would have required teachers to out their students.

A full accounting of Campfield’s antics would run the length of The Goldfinch,
but here’s one more: After reporters reprinted some of the wingnuttier
comments he had posted publicly, he threatened to take legal action
against media outlets that quoted his blog. After ten years in the
legislature, Campfield is being targeted by Republicans and Democrats
alike this year. In an uncharacteristic move, Republican Governor Bill
Haslam has even flirted with endorsing Campfield’s primary opponent. But
caution might be in order. If he is struck down, might he become more
powerful than we can possibly imagine? — Steven Hale, Nashville Scene

Hatemonger

Texas State Board of Education Member Ken Mercer

Texas is, as so many clichés note, a big place, so its
decisions about what to include in its textbooks affect classrooms
beyond the state’s borders. When former state education board member
Cynthia Dunbar, a homeschooler, wrote a book that said the creation of
public schools was “tyrannical” and public education was a “subtly
deceptive tool of perversion,” non-Texans were understandably curious
about what sort of yahoos had their fingers in the educational soup.
Then there was Don McLeroy, the former board chairman who famously said,
“Somebody’s gotta stand up to the experts,” as he attempted to push
creationism into science textbooks.

That particular pair of Lone Star loons is off the board
now, and with their departure the board has fallen out of the national
headlines. In recent years, the state legislature has even clipped the
board’s wings some. But don’t let that fool you into believing that the
overseers of Texas schools have gone pink. They haven’t and won’t. Not
with Ken Mercer still fighting the godly fight.

When his home city of San Antonio was adopting an
ordinance banning LGBT discrimination last year, Mercer urged the city
council to reject it. “Child molesters and sexual deviants will love
this ordinance,” he said. Because, you know, gay equals child molester.

That point of view is merely grossly offensive and,
frankly, not uncommon down South. For sheer, breathtaking dumbness,
nothing tops his stunning 2011 refutation of evolution: “If your theory
is right, all these species would get together and form a new species.
Then where is the cat-dog or the rat-cat, whatever it be? They don’t
come together. Cats go with cats, and dogs go with dogs.”

Where to begin with Leland Yee? The longtime San
Francisco-area pol, a Democrat, was indicted in March for trading an
official proclamation for $6,800 in cash from an undercover FBI agent,
as well as brokering a meeting between a prospective donor and his
fellow legislators in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars in
“donations” well in excess of federal campaign limits. But that’s not
even the good stuff. The good stuff involves international arms dealing
and a codefendant named Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow.

Chow, we learned from court documents, is a convicted
felon once involved with everything from dealing heroin to pimping
underage girls. But even while being held up as a model of
rehabilitation by no less than U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chow led
an international crime syndicate involved with murder for hire, money
laundering, and drug and gun trafficking, prosecutors allege.

When an FBI agent pretending to be part of Chow’s gang
approached Yee for help with obtaining missiles and other weapons, the
state senator didn’t just agree to help. Prosecutors allege he also
walked the agent through the steps to acquire them from a Muslim
separatist group in the Philippines.

There’s much, much more to the story, but here’s probably a
good place to end when it comes to Senator Yee: When this onetime
rising star in the California Democratic Party failed to resign his
seat, fellow senators voted to suspend him with pay. And though those
pesky criminal charges forced Yee to abandon his run for California
secretary of state, it was too late to change the ballots, and the flood
of bad publicity around his name didn’t seem to matter much to voters —
more than a half-million Californians still backed him.

The would-be arms dealer who allegedly exchanged political favors for money beat out five other candidates. — Sarah Fenske, L.A. Weekly

Sleazeball

Arkansas Lieutenant Governor Mark Darr

Why did Mark Darr get elected lieutenant governor of
Arkansas in 2010? Because there was an “R” after his name in an
anti-Obama tidal wave.

The number two officer in the Razorback State is as
useless as teats on a boar hog. Because of a weird provision in the 1874
Arkansas Constitution, he may preside over sessions of the state Senate
and act as executive when the governor leaves the state.

While in office doing nothing, Darr glad-handed, went to
rodeos, and made plans to run for Congress. But his congressional
campaign collapsed days after it began when news broke that he had been
cheating on his campaign finance reports. After the election for
lieutenant governor was over, he continued raising money and spending it
on himself and family, from gasoline to hotel rooms to clothing. A
deeper look revealed he had also cheated on his public expense account.
Nobody should have been surprised. He had run a family pizza business
into the ground and got upside down on his home mortgage, among other
personal missteps. After ignoring months of bipartisan calls to step
down — at one point issuing a statement, vowing to keep fighting “for
those Arkansans who are sick and tired of these types of political games
and the people who play them” — Darr resigned in February. He still
owes the state almost $10,000 and is paying his ethics fine on time.
Federal investigators continue to review his case. — Max Brantley, Arkansas Times

Sleazeball

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne

Photo courtesy Tom Tingle

Attorney General Tom Horne is the highest law enforcement
official in Arizona, but he has less integrity than the slimy political
hacks who now no longer return his calls. Horne has been dogged by
allegations of impropriety ever since he was banned for life from the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 1973.

In other words, Arizonans should have seen this one coming
like triple-digit heat in July. But the Canadian-born
Democrat-turned-Republican successfully cheated his way into office
during a close 2010 general election by allegedly coordinating illegally
with an independent expenditure committee run by his political
operative, current AG outreach director Kathleen Winn.

No one would have known of this campaign hanky-panky were
it not for Horne’s own bumbling in office. First, he hired his mistress
for a six-figure job she was unqualified for. Then, when Phoenix New Times
published a piece about this impropriety, he assigned a veteran AG
investigator to find the “leak” in his administration. Instead, the
investigator uncovered evidence of lawbreaking by the AG and his staff,
including the aforementioned campaign-finance violations, which the
investigator dutifully turned over to the FBI.

Horne avoided an indictment but was hit with a $400,000
civil fine, which he’s been dodging in court. Meanwhile, an ex-staffer
has accused him of running his re-election campaign out of his public
office (that’s illegal, son) and has backed up the allegations with 146
pages of emails and documents, including the metadata to show who did
what and when.

Realizing he’s as done as a burnt corn dog, Arizona
Republicans want him to bow out, but — always delusional — Horne ain’t
going nowhere without further making a fool of himself. So his campaign
and disastrous reign continue apace. — Stephen Lemons, Phoenix New Times

Sleazeball

Campo Mayor Ray Johnson, Colorado

Being the mayor of tiny Campo isn’t a full-time job, so
Ray Johnson has plenty of time to run his barbecue joint, Ray’s
Smokehouse, sell cars, work on his cattle ranch, DJ dances, and get more
tattoos — he’s been billed as the most tattooed mayor in the nation.

In fact, Johnson was missing so much work while traveling
to see his favorite tattoo artist that he thought of resigning a few
years ago: “I wasn’t doing it justice here,” he said. But the
townspeople encouraged him to stay — a move they may regret now. Because
in February, Johnson and his twin sons, Kevin and Kasey, were arrested
and charged with theft and embezzlement.

According to Campo’s police chief, the trio had stolen
more than 230 gallons of the town’s gas, worth up to a thousand dollars,
in six weeks — all documented in a video that showed the Johnsons using
a locked pump to fill their personal cars and gas cans. The case is
pending.

Kevin, a sergeant with the Campo Police Department, had a
key to the pump for his patrol car. Kasey is also a public servant: He’s
with the volunteer Campo Fire Department, where busy Ray Johnson is the
assistant fire chief. Ray is also a deacon at the Campo Baptist Church
and “spends a great deal of his time volunteering for the community,”
according to the Ray’s Smokehouse website — and volunteering, it would
seem, to relieve the community of some of its gas. — Patricia Calhoun, Westword

Sleazeball

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal

We’ll skip Nathan Deal’s congressional service, which
ended with a probe into why the Republican tried to persuade state
officials not to scrap a lucrative salvage program that benefited a
company he co-owned.

Since moving into the governor’s mansion in 2011, he’s
helped a state senator land a cushy $150,000 radio gig with the state
media outlet (which the lawmaker held while also lobbying for the
Asian-American Hotel Owners Association).

Most recently, Deal wanted to narrow the definition of a
government whistleblower — a policy proposal made right after the state
was ordered to pay a former ethics commission employee a seven-figure
sum for wrongful termination after she tried to investigate his
gubernatorial campaign. Want to take a look at documents related to the
controversial sale of that salvage yard to a company that owes the state
tens of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes? An open-records request
will cost you millions of dollars!

Deal also falls on the wrong sides of issues. Expanding
Medicaid — and helping hundreds of thousands of Georgians access health
care — is now much tougher since he supported state lawmakers’ proposal
to take away his authority to do so.

In an attempt to sway potential voters, he increased
education funding by $500 million, which sounds nice until you realize
that it’s an election year — and that his party has axed nearly $8
billion in school funding over the past decade. After he botched the
state’s response to a winter storm, leaving people stranded in freezing
temperatures, he led the media on a $12,000 helicopter tour to check out
a second storm’s ice damage (which was minimal). And his administration
paid thousands of dollars to a national publication that says Georgia
is the best state to do business. The biggest head-scratcher: Deal might
very well be re-elected in November. — Max Blau, Creative Loafing

Sleazeball

Florida Governor Rick Scott

He looks like Voldemort, speaks in the high-pitched timbre
of a Wes Anderson movie villain, and wants to drug-test as many human
beings as possible. More disastrous for Florida residents, he’s
recklessly rejected federal stimulus packages and dismantled regulatory
agencies. He’s Rick Scott, and he’s America’s least popular governor for
damn good reason.

Backed by a wave of Tea Party support — and bankrolled by
$70 million of his own cash — he won a shocking gubernatorial victory in
2010. The win was all the more remarkable considering Scott’s
background. His fortune came from founding a health-care empire, later
called Columbia/HCA, which paid the single largest Medicare fraud fine
in U.S. history — $1.7 billion for stealing from the feds.

Scott showed that his wanton disregard for regulation
didn’t end with his golden parachute from his felonious firm. In the
governor’s office, he quickly stripped millions of dollars from the
state health-care agency and laid off environmental regulators. He also
signed new laws requiring all welfare recipients and every state
employee to undergo random drug testing. How did he get around the
slightly sticky wicket that a firm he owned makes millions by
administering such tests? He signed the company over to his wife. (The
courts have since thrown out the drug-testing laws for violating the
Fourth Amendment.)

He’s made other shady moves. Scott rejected $2.4 billion
in federal aid to build a high-speed train in Central Florida and lied
about the state having to eat cost overruns for the project. During the
2012 presidential election, he tried to suppress black votes with
blatantly race-based bans on Sunday early voting (which black
congregations dominate). He also tried to kill a prescription-drug
database that has decimated oxycodone abuse, while his underfunded
health-care agency has allowed steroid clinics — like the Biogenesis
clinic at the heart of last year’s Major League Baseball scandal — to
proliferate.

And through it all, Scott has largely flouted Florida’s
“Sunshine laws” by hiding his correspondence from the public and
resisted reporters’ attempts to hold him accountable — all while
grinning like a demented right-wing Skeletor for TV cameras at scripted
events. Is it any wonder his opinion polls have struggled to top 30
percent since he was elected? — Tim Elfrink, Miami New Times

Sleazeball

Michigan Speaker of the House Jase Bolger

It’s puzzling how Jase Bolger has remained speaker of
Michigan’s Republican-led house. He previously led the state GOP’s quest
to eliminate (nonexistent) voter fraud and, more recently, supported
the politically sheisty move to reallocate Michigan’s electoral votes
based on who wins the popular vote — in districts he helped gerrymander
to the benefit of his party.

But Bolger’s most egregious move came during the 2012
election cycle: He hatched a scheme to rig the election in Michigan’s
76th House District. Bolger conspired with state Representative Roy
Schmidt, a Republican from Grand Rapids, to have Schmidt register as a
Democrat in the race at the very last second. Schmidt had his son find a
phony candidate and agreed to pay to have this person file for the race
but never actually campaign.

Their guinea pig initially agreed to go along with the
plan but later backed out. Nonetheless, a Republican prosecutor who
investigated the case determined the episode wasn’t illegal but was
obviously unethical. The prosecutor, William Forsyth, wrote he was
embarrassed by Bolger’s plan, a move he said was “clearly intended to
undermine the election and to perpetrate a fraud on the electorate.” — Ryan Felton, Detroit Metro Times

Sleazeball

Wayne County Executive Bob Ficano, Michigan

The local commentariat was stunned to hear Wayne County
Executive Bob Ficano would run for a fourth term this year. His
administration has been rife with scandal from the onset of his tenure. A
handful of Ficano aides have been federally indicted for bribery or
conspiracy charges. County employees have received sweetheart severance
packages: One got $250,000 just for being fired, only to earn an
additional $700,000 after a court determined she was improperly canned.

Some officials have received such lucrative pension deals
that they’ve been able to retire in their 40s. All thanks to Ficano. The
county executive’s most recent flub involved a proposed jail in
downtown Detroit. Ficano had to scrap the half-built project because it
was $100 million over budget. On top of that, he hasn’t been able to
grapple with the county’s debt, which has ballooned to $175 million. If
Ficano’s recent plan to shed that debt fails, reports have suggested
Wayne could be the first county to receive a state-appointed emergency
manager who would have near-total control over its day-to-day finances. —
Ryan Felton, Detroit Metro Times

Sleazeball

Former Idaho House Representative Phil Hart

Phil Hart represented Idaho’s panhandle for four terms in
the Idaho House of Representatives. But he spent almost as much time in
state and federal courtrooms as he spent in the Idaho Capitol.

Hart appeared on most citizens’ radar with his sponsorship
of something called the Idaho Silver Gem Act, which would have allowed
Idahoans to pay taxes using silver bars — mined in his home district.
But Hart had no intention of paying his own taxes; he stopped filing
returns in 1996. At last count, the IRS said Hart owed feds around
$500,000, and the State of Idaho said he owes about $53,000 to its tax
commission.

But Hart’s real chutzpah came when he regularly argued
that his status as a state legislator granted him protection from
dealing with the tax authorities. Meanwhile, Hart continued to tangle
with the Idaho House ethics committee, which ultimately decided to let
its fellow legislator skate away unscathed. Perhaps most important, Hart
was regularly re-elected to the legislature by wide margins.

And in a peculiar twist, he was reportedly found asleep in
his car at a rural rest stop in April 2012 where a woman had been shot.
Idaho police ended up clearing Hart and sending him on his way, saying
it was just a bizarre coincidence.

Too many scandals eventually caught up with Hart, and he
lost a 2012 GOP primary. But his epitaph is far from being written:
Federal authorities say they’re still laying the groundwork for criminal
tax charges against the former lawmaker. — George Prentice, Boise Weekly

Sleazeball

Illinois State Representative Derrick Smith

Derrick Smith is merely the latest Illinois politician to
transition from the corridors of power to the criminal court system. But
he didn’t do it without help from some of the top political operators
in the state — and from the voting public.

Smith was once fired from a gig as a city streets and
sanitation supervisor. Yet with the support of Illinois Secretary of
State Jesse White, the most popular figure in state government, Smith
ended up in the General Assembly in 2011. During his first term, he was a
loyal soldier for White and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan,
though he remained highly visible in his Chicago district.

But in 2012, Smith agreed to write a letter supporting a
state grant for a daycare center in his district — all he needed in
return was a little “donation.” On March 10 of that year, Smith met with
someone connected to the daycare center and happily accepted $7,000 in
cash.

Alas, he didn’t have much time to enjoy it, because the
daycare representative turned out to be a mole for the FBI. Three days
later, Smith was arrested and charged with taking a bribe.

Undaunted, Smith decided he could and should continue to
serve the people. A week after his arrest, he won the Democratic
primary. His colleagues in the state house voted to oust him from
office, but Smith reclaimed his seat in November 2012.

His loyal Democratic votes in the house were enough to
secure the ongoing support of Speaker Madigan, but Smith’s good fortune
ran out when he lost in a recent primary. Then, earlier this month, a
federal jury found him guilty of bribery and attempted extortion. He
faces up to 30 years in prison but continues to insist the naysayers
have it wrong. “God knows the truth about it all,” he told reporters
after his conviction. “The jury just didn’t see what God saw.” — Mick Dumke, Chicago Reader

Sleazeball

Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernandez, Florida

Pobre Hialeah. The sixth largest city in Florida
and second most populous in Miami-Dade County is one of the biggest
Cuban-American enclaves in the United States — and it’s also probably
the only town in the land that’s been run by two consecutive loan
sharks.

Three years
ago, Hialeah residents thought they had rid themselves of one of the
slimiest operatives in America, Mayor Julio Robaina. “El Jefe,” it turns
out, was doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars in off-the-books
loans and then charging up to 36 percent annual interest. Unfortunately
for Robaina, one of the regular customers of his black-market operation
was a local jewelry store owner who was also running a massive $40
million Ponzi scheme. When the scam toppled and trustees went looking
for spoils, they began asking about the $300,000 the store owner had
paid to the mayor. Robaina soon found himself under federal indictment
for tax fraud. (He was later found not guilty by a jury and blamed the
missing taxes on accounting errors.)

Pretty bad,
right? Luckily in 2011, Hialeah got rid of Robaina when he resigned to
run for county mayor, replacing him with Carlos Hernandez, his
squeaky-clean deputy. All seemed well until this April, when Hernandez
was called as a witness in Robaina’s trial and put on the stand, where
he promptly admitted under oath that yes, indeed, he’d run his own
high-interest loan scheme and had even done a $100,000 deal with the
same Ponzi schemer.

The good news
is that if you’re hanging in Hialeah and need some bones on the quick,
there’s no need to turn to a shady check-cashing operation. Just head to
city hall. — Tim Elfrink, Miami New Times

Sleazeball

Massachusetts State House Speaker Robert DeLeo

Robert DeLeo has bobbed and weaved around investigations
that have come dangerously close to his circle. But he has somehow
avoided the same criminal fate of the three consecutive house patriarchs
before him. Nevertheless, with occasional reluctant aid from POTUS
prospect Governor Deval Patrick, the speaker has reacted more to
headlines than the commonwealth’s needs.

From facilitating ineffective three-strikes legislation in
response to the high-profile murder of a single cop, to perpetually
playing politics with casinos and medical marijuana, to his despicably
stubborn stance on increasing the minimum wage, DeLeo demonstrates that
in true-blue Massachusetts, Democrats generally make the best villains. —
Chris Faraone, Dig Boston

Sleazeball

Montana State Senator Art Wittich

The call for campaign finance reform has escalated
dramatically since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens
United case. Much of the concern centers on the shadowy world of
so-called dark-money groups — politically active nonprofits that aren’t
required to disclose their donors. No politician in Montana is more
closely tied to dark money than Senator Art Wittich, a Republican from
Bozeman and the 2013 state senate majority leader.

For years, Wittich’s law firm acted as the registered
agent for the nonprofit, Colorado-based American Tradition Partnership
(ATP). Formerly known as Western Tradition Partnership, ATP was featured
in a 2012 exposé on Frontline. Wittich’s firm also represented
ATP in its challenge to Montana’s Corrupt Practices Act, which barred
corporate spending in state campaigns for a century. The act was
overturned.

Relying in part on information contained in several boxes
of documents recovered from a meth house in Colorado, Montana’s
Commissioner of Political Practices has issued eight rulings of campaign
practice violations against ATP over the past year. One of them was
tied to Wittich’s 2010 primary bid.

The commissioner also ruled this year that Wittich
violated campaign law during that race by coordinating with and
accepting corporate donations through ATP. A district court judge
recently declined a recommendation that Wittich be removed from the 2014
ballot. So the senator will again bid to run — in a district where he
does not reside. — Alex Sakariassen, Missoula Independent

Sleazeball

Pennsylvania State Senator LeAnna Washington

LeAnna Washington, age 68, was not one to let her July
birthday go by without a big bash that doubled as a campaign fundraiser.
Problem is, she used her state office staff to plan and promote her
elaborate gala, according to a grand jury report released this past
March. In fact, some of her staffers allege they spent the weeks and
months leading up to the party concentrating entirely on the
celebration.

Those who objected say they saw their salaries cut or were
shown the door. When a former aide challenged the senator, telling her
it was illegal to use her state office staff this way, she allegedly
blew up at him: “I am the f—ing senator, I do what the f— I want,
and ain’t nobody going to change me,” she told him, according to the
grand jury report. “I have been doing it like this for 17 years. So stop
trying to change me.”

The Democratic senator is accused of spending between
$30,000 and $100,000 in state taxpayer funds on her annual gala
fundraiser and now faces felony charges of conflict of interest and
theft of services. Voters in the Democratic primary in May told
Washington she could no longer have her cake and eat it too. She lost
her bid for nomination to another term of the senate seat she has held
since 2005. — Lil Swanson, Philadelphia City Paper

Sleazeball

Former Washington, D.C. Councilman Harry Thomas Jr.

Photo courtesy Darrow Montgomery

Harry Thomas Jr. isn’t the first public official to steal
from kids. But for pure brazenness, it’s hard to beat this
sticky-fingered former council member.

Thomas came from a long-running D.C. political dynasty,
and it seemed like only a matter of time before he moved up to the
mayor’s suite. But when he ran for re-election for his council seat in
2010, Thomas’ Republican opponent noticed something: The financial
records for a nonprofit run by Thomas were a mess.

His group, Team Thomas, was supposed to be about
introducing at-risk kids to sports like baseball and golf. What it
actually did, its financial records revealed, was introduce Thomas to a
life of luxury. Enlisting his own staff and corrupted nonprofit
officials, he steered grant money toward his organization and then used
it to buy trips to Pebble Beach and, in one instance, a $59,000 Audi
SUV.

Thanks to his long-shot Republican opponent’s digging,
Thomas went on to resign from the council, and in 2012 he pleaded guilty
to embezzling $353,500. But the ultimate insult was still to come. As
Thomas’ sentencing neared, the District government released more of
Thomas’ bank records. Along with the fancy trips and dinners, it turned
out, Thomas spent $89 of stolen money on leather chaps — proving that
you can steal money, but you can’t steal taste. — Will Sommer, Washington City Paper

Sleazeball

Former Washington, D.C. Councilman Michael Brown

Photo courtesy Darrow Montgomery

With Clinton-era Commerce Secretary Ron Brown as his
father, Michael Brown could have been anything he wanted — a business
mogul, a top lawyer, maybe a cabinet secretary himself. Instead, he
became one of the most crooked council members in District of Columbia
history.

Brown saw a chance to outdo his father’s legacy by winning
elected office. He threw his hat into a 2006 race, only to hear from a
city Medicaid contractor who offered him $200,000 to drop out and
endorse the contractor’s favored candidate. Brown took the cash, then
received hundreds of thousands of dollars more in illicit help from the
contractor, and finally won a council seat in 2008.

On the council, the sharp-dressing Brown made his name as a
crusader for the poor. But he had his own financial woes, including a
home in D.C.’s tony Chevy Chase neighborhood weighed down by nearly $2
million in mortgage and IRS liens. When another group of would-be city
contractors offered Brown bribes to help get government business, he
jumped at the chance.

The eager contractors, though, were actually undercover
FBI agents. The bribes would turn out to be the end of Brown’s
white-collar crime spree. Videos released after his indictment on
bribery charges in June 2012 showed the councilman eagerly grabbing at
duffel bags and mugs filled with cash.

Though Brown’s legacy won’t outshine his father’s, he has
introduced a phrase to the District’s corruption lexicon. Before helping
the agents, Brown told them he would need his “piece of the piece” — in
other words, another stack of bills. — Will Sommer, Washington City Paper

Horn Dog

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa, Colorado

Terry Maketa chases bad guys — when this bad boy isn’t
chasing skirts, that is. After the married politician was accused of
having sexual relationships with several women on his staff — including
one he elevated to oversee the sheriff’s office budget and another who
was promoted despite the fact that her major credential was being a nude
model — the county commissioners unanimously passed a vote of no
confidence. But the term-limited Maketa decided the sheriff’s office
ethics policies didn’t apply to him. He wanted to override the
nominations of worthy deputies in order to award the office’s One
Hundred Club prize — essentially an employee-of-the-year honor, complete
with gold watch — to himself. And he doesn’t plan to write any
resignation letter, maybe because he’s too busy writing messages like
this one, sent to one of his female colleagues: “I think often about
touching kissing and licking every inch of your amazing body.”

When three of his commanders filed a complaint against
Maketa in May that included reports of sexual harassment and accused him
of running a hostile workplace, they were put on administrative leave.
And Maketa initially denied the allegations: “I have never had an
inappropriate sexual relationship with the three individuals you named,”
he told the Gazette, which broke the story. “If you publish
anything to the contrary, I am fully prepared to take legal action.” But
a week later, Maketa took another kind of action entirely, releasing a
video apologizing to employees and admitting he’d “engaged in
inappropriate behavior in the past.” — Patricia Calhoun, Westword

Horn Dog

Kentucky State Representative Jim Gooch

While serving in the Kentucky General Assembly for the
past two decades, Jim Gooch has made a name for himself as the state’s
number one climate-change denier. Gooch — as chair of the House Natural
Resources and Environment Committee — once held a hearing to get to the
bottom of this so-called global warming kerfuffle; the hearing featured
only two witnesses who were climate-change deniers but not scientists.
He explained he didn’t want any scientists to testify because “you can
only hear that the sky is falling so many times.”

Gooch has accused the scientific community of engaging in a
massive coverup and fraud to perpetuate the “hoax” of global warming
and has even suggested that Kentucky secede from the union to avoid EPA
rules. He also sponsored a bill this year to openly discriminate against
utility companies that seek to switch from coal to natural gas. Gooch
happens to own a company that primarily sells mining equipment to coal
companies.

This year, he also made a name for himself as being quite
the ladies’ man. He interrupted and blocked a vote to recognize the
courage of two legislative staffers who stepped forward to accuse a
legislator of rampant sexual harassment. Following that spectacle, the
same staffers accused Gooch of inappropriate behavior, including
throwing a pair of pink panties onto their table at a conference and
saying, “I’m looking for the lady who lost these.” Gooch excused himself
by saying that a woman had slipped the panties into his pocket moments
earlier and that “actually they weren’t pink; I think they may have been
beige.” — Joe Sonka, LEO Weekly

Horn Dog

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, Arizona

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu is trying hard to climb
out of a political hole he dug for himself in 2012, when his Mexican
ex-lover accused the border hawk and congressional candidate of
threatening him with deportation.

This March, Babeu was on a gun-loving national radio show
(one of many such appearances) talking about how “we gotta continue to
stand up for our Second Amendment rights, our liberties, and freedoms.”

A Fox News darling before the scandal, he wants back into the national spotlight — and he wants it bad.

The Massachusetts transplant became a rising star in the
national Republican Party after capitalizing on — and exaggerating —
violence along the Mexican border. He also blasted President Barack
Obama and his administration, which got him plenty of airtime on Fox.

The juice was enough to encourage Babeu to leap from
sheriff and make a bid for a seat in Arizona’s family-values-centric
Fourth Congressional District, whose denizens were unlikely to take
kindly to a gay politician.

Except Babeu, at the time, wasn’t openly gay. This changed
when his former boyfriend, Jose Orozco, a Mexican national, sent the
Tea Party sheriff reeling with concern that Orozco would expose his
sexual orientation. If the undocumented Orozco said a word, the ex
claimed, Babeu threatened to have him kicked out of the country.

The situation was ironic and hypocritical. Here was a
right-wing politician who blustered about keeping Mexicans on their side
of the border who had dated his constituents’ enemy. Oh, in addition,
the congressional candidate posted half-naked photos of himself on a
hook-up site for gay men (and included the length of his penis), which
Orozco made public.

Babeu had to drop out of the congressional race,
naturally. But that was two years ago. He hopes Arizona voters have a
short memory. — Monica Alonzo, Phoenix New Times

Horn Dog

U.S. Representative Mark Sanford, South Carolina

Until June 2009, Mark Sanford was little more than a
buffoon in C Street slacks and a sensible libertarian sports jacket from
the clearance rack at Kohl’s. During his first term as governor of
South Carolina and most of his second, there were laughs aplenty. He
took two piglets into the statehouse to protest earmarks. One was named
Pork, the other Barrel — natch — and one, if not both, promptly shat on
the floor during Sanford’s important presser.

Then there was the time when the state legislature
overrode, or nearly overrode, all of his vetoes. We’re not sure if that
was in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, or 2009 because it seemed to
happen every year. And then there was Sanford’s general weirdness. When
he was a child, his well-to-do family slept in the same room during the
summer to conserve electricity, and when his father died, guess who made
the coffin — Mark. During his gubernatorial years, Sanford liked to dig
holes with a hydraulic excavator back at his country farm in order to
relax — unfortunately, a child fell into one of those holes and died.

But then came some real creepiness. It began when Sanford
apparently told his staff he was taking off to hike the Appalachian
Trail, but instead he flew to Argentina on the taxpayer’s dime to be
with his mistress.

Upon his return home, the Luv Guv gave a strangely honest
but extremely uncomfortable confession on live television. Much to
everyone’s surprise, the Bible-beating members of the South Carolina
Statehouse didn’t demand his immediate resignation — and this was even
after they had read his erotic poetry. Shortly after Sanford’s affair
became public, his wife Jenny divorced him and wrote a tell-all book
(the governor once gave her a piece of paper for her birthday featuring a
drawing of half of a bicycle, and the next year he gave her a drawing
with the other half, along with a $25 used bike). Jenny also filed a
complaint with the court after Mark repeatedly trespassed on her
property; he even hung out at her home during the Super Bowl when she
wasn’t there.

And get this, he flew airplanes at their two sons. Yes, you read that correctly — he flew airplanes at
his children, whatever that means, according to the divorce settlement.
But despite all of that — the cheating, the lying, the stalking, and
the childhood terrorizing — Sanford ran for his old U.S. House seat and
won. Now he can take his mistress out to eat in D.C. without meeting the
disapproving eyes of his constituents back home in Charleston.— Chris Haire, Charleston City Paper

Horn Dog

U.S. Representative Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee

No one should be robbed of the joy of discovering an
artist’s early, lesser-known work. So if you don’t know the pre-2012
past of Republican Scott DesJarlais — whom Esquire’s indubitable political blogger Charles P. Pierce dubbed a “baldheaded bag of douche from Tennessee” — allow us to loop you in.

In 2010, when the then-unknown Dr. DesJarlais was
challenging incumbent Democratic Congressman Lincoln Davis in
Tennessee’s Fourth District, things got ugly. That was because some
papers from DesJarlais’ divorce nearly ten years earlier made their way
into the public eye. The good doctor’s ex-wife claimed his behavior had
become “violent and threatening.” She accused him of dry-firing a gun
outside her bedroom and putting a gun in his mouth for three hours.
DesJarlais cast the revelations as the desperate “gutter campaign” of a
losing candidate.

But that gutter proved to be a veritable Mariana Trench.
Two years later, DesJarlais, who by then had become an incumbent, found
himself in trouble again when more information surfaced from the same
bitter divorce. This time it was revealed that the “pro-life, pro-family
values” Republican had pressured a mistress — who was also a patient of
his — to get an abortion. He would later explain that, actually, he had
pushed for her to get an abortion as part of a ruse to expose the fact
that her pregnancy was a lie.

Brilliant! There was more: dalliances with six women — two
patients, three co-workers, and a drug rep — and a confession that he
had supported his ex-wife’s decision to get two abortions before they
were married. By the grace of Tennessee voters, he was re-elected. By
the grace of God, that will be corrected this fall. — Steven Hale, Nashville Scene

Horn Dog

Former Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon, Washington

Aaron Reardon was the golden boy, the rising star of the
Democratic Party in Washington state. Brash and cocky as a rooster,
sure, but someday, most political observers agreed, he would sit in the
governor’s mansion.

When he was sworn into office in 2004, Reardon was the
youngest county executive in the nation. His fall from grace began a
couple of years ago when a very tan bodybuilder named Tamara — also a
county social worker — came forward to reveal her long affair with
Reardon, a married man with two young children. There were junkets, most
of them put on the county’s credit card, and even an intimacy kit
containing condoms and lubricants purchased during one of their trysts
at a boutique hotel in Washington, D.C.

In Chicago, he skipped out on the Democratic Leadership
Council conference by faking a headache and then hailed a taxi to have
dinner and drinks with Tamara. Reardon weathered scandal after scandal —
the out-of-control drunkard of a planning director he hired who groped a
building-industry lobbyist on a golf course, allegations of using
county resources for his campaign, a Washington State Patrol
investigation into his travel.

Then came the final straw, which smacked of Nixonian
politics: One of his staffers concocted a phony name and made
public-records requests of county employees who had spoken to police
about Reardon’s involvement with Tamara. His staff was also tied to web
pages that attacked Reardon’s political opponents. Reardon resigned last
year and called for an independent investigation into “false and
scurrilous accusations.” He is said to be living in exile somewhere in
Arizona. — Ellis E. Conklin, Seattle Weekly

Blowhard

U.S. Representative Trent Franks, Arizona

Congressman Trent Franks is a Tea Party Republican who’s
obsessed with women’s private parts. Don’t believe it? It’s reflected in
the umpteen anti-abortion bills that this one-trick political pony has
sponsored during his lawmaking career.

Considered nutty by too many of his congressional colleagues, none has gone anywhere.

Most infamous, a 2013 bill that Franks introduced would
have outlawed all abortions 20 weeks after fertilization. In pushing for
the law, Franks, who must have graduated from the Todd Akin and Richard
Mourdock School of Medicine, tried to assuage his colleagues’ concerns
about pregnancy from sexual assault by telling them that “the incidences
of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.”

Franks not only wields ineffective power in defense of
women’s privates, but he also introduced a narrow piece of legislation
simply to prevent one Arizona Indian tribe from building a casino west
of Phoenix. It didn’t matter that an act of Congress had granted the
Tohono O’odham Nation the right to build its resort-style gaming center
because the feds inadvertently destroyed a huge swath of the tribe’s
reservation long ago.

Family values were what mattered to Franks. Think about
the horror of children seeing a casino near their neighborhood! The
truth was that another tribe already had a casino in the area and didn’t
want competition, which is why it sought Franks’ help and contributed
to his campaign coffers.

The arch-conservative sure didn’t mind helping out anybody who helps him out — the kids be damned. — Monica Alonzo, Phoenix New Times

Blowhard

U.S. Representative Paul Broun, Georgia

Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore

Why legislate when you can embarrass? Since arriving in
Washington in 2007, the right-as-you-can-go Republican doctor has
perfected a special kind of crazy — and President Barack Obama, who
Broun claims upholds the “Soviet Constitution,” has been a frequent
target.

Over the course of five terms, Broun has compared Obama to
Adolf Hitler, expressed doubts over the commander-in-chief’s
citizenship, and pondered his impeachment. While discussing the
potential pitfalls of the Affordable Care Act, he referred to the Civil
War as the “War of Yankee Aggression.” Broun, who is a medical doctor,
also proclaimed that global warming was “one of the greatest hoaxes
perpetrated by the scientific community” and that evolution was a lie
“from the pit of Hell” — comments that no doubt spurred more than 4,000
Athens voters to write in “Charles Darwin” as an alternative to Broun.

A clean energy bill in 2010 would bring death to not only
jobs, he said, but also probably people. Keep in mind that citizens
might be hard-pressed to remember Broun’s proposing any important
legislation — except for maybe an amendment to the Military Honor and
Decency Act, which banned the sale or rental of sexually explicit
materials at military facilities.

But it’s not just verbal gaffes and a dearth of ideas.
Twice Broun has landed on the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington’s list of most corrupt members, most recently for failing to
disclose the source of loans to his campaign. (Broun disputed the
allegation and sent a local newspaper a copy of a letter claiming the
Office of Congressional Ethics found no wrongdoing.)

Come next year, however, we say goodbye to Broun. He lost a U.S. Senate bid in a crowded GOP primary May 20. — Thomas Wheatley, Creative Loafing

Blowhard

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Illinois

Photo courtesy Chandler West

Even toward the end of his 22-year mayoral reign, when he
started selling off pieces of the city to hide its escalating financial
woes, Richard M. Daley had broad support in Chicago. Sure, he was a
tyrannical, thin-skinned jerk who doled out jobs and contracts to his
friends, but he was the people’s tyrannical, thin-skinned jerk who doled
out jobs and contracts to his friends. His successor, Rahm Emanuel, is
simply a jerk.

At least that’s how he’s seen by lots of Chicagoans after his first three years in office. In a recent poll commissioned by the Chicago Sun-Times, Emanuel had the support of a meager 29 percent of city voters.

The mayor and his allies stress he’s made “tough choices”
to get the city back on track, starting with restoring fiscal
discipline. It’s certainly true he’s shuttered mental health clinics,
raised water fees, privatized city jobs, laid off teachers, and closed
schools — four dozen of them at once. At the same time, he’s poured
millions of additional dollars into nonunionized, privately run charter
schools.

But it’s not only what he’s done; it’s also how he’s done
it. Emanuel is widely seen as an outsider who uses Chicago as a backdrop
for his broader political ambitions. Though he appears regularly in
city neighborhoods for news conferences, his daily meeting schedule is
filled with millionaire corporate leaders and investors, earning him the
nickname “Mayor 1%” (and inspiring a book of that name by journalist
Kari Lydersen). He jets regularly to Washington to maintain his national
image — yet he also has a knack for avoiding the spotlight at home when
it’s especially hot, such as the time he was on a ski vacation when the
school-closings list was released.

Still, Emanuel remains a formidable politician. He already
has more than $7 million in his campaign coffers and is prepared to
raise millions more before he’s up for election next February. Rahm may
not be loved, but he’s unlikely to go down unless some high-profile
candidate runs against him, and so far, that special someone hasn’t
jumped into the race. — Mick Dumke, Chicago Reader

Blowhard

Kentucky State Senator Damon Thayer

Damon Thayer is the Republican senate majority leader of
the Kentucky General Assembly and a man who never met a camera or
microphone he didn’t want to stick his face in front of. That even
includes those belonging to The Daily Show, which he obliged to
mock him in an interview last year over his bill to nullify any new
federal gun control legislation within Kentucky, because the state
didn’t vote for President Obama in 2012. Thayer said the federal
legislation expanding criminal background checks for gun purchases to
exclude felons was an effort of liberals who “hate law-abiding citizens
who want to buy guns.” In other words, he sought to violate the
Constitution so felons can still buy guns easily, because Obama, man!

Thayer’s main accomplishment in this year’s session of the
general assembly was to once again block a popular bipartisan bill to
automatically restore the voting rights of former nonviolent felons in
Kentucky, which has the most restrictive system in the nation (one in
five African-American males is ineligible to vote). After the bill
passed the house nearly unanimously for the fifth straight year — and
with new support by Senator Rand Paul — many assumed the senate would
follow suit, until Thayer added a last-minute amendment that gutted the
bill and excluded the majority of those eligible to have their rights
restored. After facing criticism for this move in a committee hearing
for the bill, Thayer told the audience they should show “some level of
gratitude” toward him for even allowing it to receive a hearing. Of
course, Thayer’s suggestion had nothing to do with the fact that most of
those potential new voters were Democrats. — Joe Sonka, LEO Weekly

Blowhard

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann, Minnesota

Minnesota natives include Prince and Michele Bachmann, explanation enough why the state’s official bird is the loon.

Both His Royal Badness and the Tea Party’s homecoming
queen have shown themselves to be geniuses at bizarre self-promotion.
Alas, only Prince is a genius at his job. The congresswoman, on the
other hand, is retiring in 2014 one step ahead of looming congressional
censure, if not outright criminal charges.

Negro Leaguer Satchel Paige once pronounced that “it ain’t
bragging if you can do it.” Bachmann, however, still preens in
self-congratulation despite her utter political failure. A defrocked
demagogue, she still pretends her Tea Party is a reactionary revolution,
not a moribund refuge for the Republicans’ traditional bloc of bat-shit
crazy far-right-wingers.

Bachmann’s gift for gaffes became horridly apparent in
2012, when she lasted one presidential primary. Visiting Waterloo, Iowa,
the candidate grandiosely lauded the town because it birthed that
embodiment of red-blooded patriotism, John Wayne. Unfortunately,
Waterloo’s most famous native son is actually mass murderer John Wayne
Gacy.

The stench still hovers from her sixth-place Iowa finish.
Her pathetic showing is remarkable considering the amount of cheating
allegedly perpetrated by the Bachmann campaign. Purported election law
violations have been or will be investigated by the House Ethics
Committee, the Federal Election Commission, Iowa’s Senate Ethics
Committee, and the FBI. Additionally, one of her Iowa operatives stands
accused of making illegal payoffs to political consultants, and Bachmann
has been sued for stealing Hawkeye State email lists.

Prospects for Bachmann’s next gig range from hosting her
own Fox News blabfest to sitting in a defendant’s chair. She has said
God told her to run for national office. And thank the Lord, Congress
shortly won’t have Michele Bachmann to kick around anymore. — Neal Karlen

Blowhard

Missouri State Senator Brian Nieves

Majority Caucus Whip Brian Nieves wasn’t about to be
sidelined last year as national lawmakers took up gun control in the
wake of the Sandy Hook school massacre. Sure, Nieves is just a lowly
state senator from Missouri, but he’d teach that “Barack Hussein Obama”
not to trample on his sacred right to bear arms.

Nieves’ “Second Amendment Protection Bill” would have made
it illegal to enforce federal gun laws in Missouri. Never mind that the
headline-grabbing bill would never have passed constitutional muster
even if the governor hadn’t vetoed it — which he did.

Undeterred, Nieves filed a similar bill this year that was
so confusing even the NRA couldn’t endorse it. Then again, not much
makes sense with Nieves — be it his screaming fits on the senate floor,
his grammatically challenged Facebook rants, or his angry exchanges with
constituents (one of whom he allegedly referred to as a “piece of
fuck”).

Oh, and let’s not forget that pending civil lawsuit in
which a fellow Republican accuses Nieves (who by his own admission is
armed “97 percent of the time”) of pulling out a gun and physically and
verbally assaulting him. Now, after a dozen wild years in office,
perhaps Nieves will finally holster it — a bit.

In March he announced his plan to leave the senate to
pursue the job of recorder of deeds in his home district. Why would a
firebrand legislator want to become a paper-pushing bureaucrat? Because,
Nieves says, the people deserve a “constitutional freedom fighter” in
county government. — Chad Garrison, Riverfront Times

Blowhard

Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, Massachusetts

A darling of neoliberals across the Greater Boston region (as well as of the Boston Globe
and both local NPR affiliates), rhetorically adorable Joe Curtatone
enjoys a glowing public profile in which he masquerades as a handsome
young progressive who morphed a postindustrial wasteland into the Hub’s
answer to Williamsburg. In reality, the seemingly delightful Democrat
and famously cool neighbor of Boston operates a municipality rife with
old-school shenanigans; turn over a rock and discover an elite and
privileged cadre of attorneys and real estate slugs who get virtually
any permissions they wish for. While the local media has mostly focused
on the artists, indie businesses, and post-hipster residents carrying
Somerville into this century, they’ve largely ignored the campaign
financing and favor deals beneath it all. How does Curtatone keep a
peachy public image despite such behavior? For starters, in 2014 his
city will spend more than $300,000 on media relations and communications
despite skyrocketing property taxes that have forced natives to flee.
At last count, Somerville had fewer than 80,000 residents. — Chris Faraone, Dig Boston

Blowhard

Montana State Representative Jerry O’Neil

In fall 2012, Montana Representative Jerry O’Neil, a
Republican from Columbia Falls, drew national media attention when he
requested that the state pay his legislative wage in gold and silver.
But his letter to Montana Legislative Services was largely laughed off.

The response was in keeping with public reaction to much
of O’Neil’s 12-year legislative record. During the 2013 legislative
session alone, he introduced bills to eliminate the minimum wage for
high school dropouts, limit the federal government’s ability to regulate
firearm restrictions, and allow criminals to opt out of jail time by
submitting themselves to corporal punishment. Of the last proposal,
O’Neil famously told the Associated Press in January 2013: “Ten years in
prison or you could take 20 lashes, perhaps two lashes a year?”

Professionally, O’Neil calls himself an “independent
paralegal.” He has been at odds with the Montana State Bar and the state
supreme court’s Commission on Unauthorized Practice ever since 2001,
when a district judge wrote a letter stating O’Neil was engaged in the
“unauthorized practice of law.”

All of this adds up to a long and predominantly
unsuccessful career of comical yet troubling policy attempts. But O’Neil
is determined to keep trying. He’s campaigning for his seventh term in
the Montana Legislature. — Alex Sakariassen, Missoula Independent

Blowhard

Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, New York

Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino seized the
moment following this past May’s rampage in Santa Barbara, California,
that left seven people dead. He aimed to bolster his conservative cred
while appealing to the moderate New York voters he’ll need to unseat
Governor Andrew Cuomo in November’s election. Astorino blamed the
tragedy on inadequate resources for mental health treatment and argued
that tighter restrictions on gun ownership would not have saved lives.
“Government failed,” the GOP gubernatorial candidate said gravely. “Here
you had a person who is mentally unstable. Clearly this young boy had
problems, and yet the system failed him.”

Though Astorino made a valid point, the glaring problem with his grandstanding, as the New York Daily News
later revealed, is that he had just spent four years slashing the
mental health budget in Westchester County. Mental health funding fell
from just under $18 million to $8.4 million on Astorino’s watch.
Staffing at the relevant county agencies dropped from 152 to 74.

Hypocrisy doesn’t necessarily equate to stupidity, but
Astorino has made a campaign pledge that covers both bases on this
issue. He has vowed to repeal New York’s SAFE Act, which was approved
after the Sandy Hook massacre. It includes a provision that requires
mental health professionals to evaluate people who have made threats to
harm themselves or others and, if necessary, refer them to authorities
who can confiscate weapons before a killing spree. — Keegan Hamilton

Big Blowhard

Donald Trump, New York

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Though the Donald isn’t technically a politician (he has
never held office), he routinely threatens to run for president and
perpetually inserts himself into the national political debate. From
stoking conspiracy theories by offering a $5 million bounty for
President Obama’s birth certificate to calling the 2012 election “a sham
and a travesty,” Trump is the ultimate political troll.

The reality TV star and real estate magnate recently toyed
with the idea of running as the GOP candidate for governor of New York
before removing himself from the race. And he has donated millions to
candidates from both parties over the years. While his political
ambitions may be as absurd as his comb-over, Trump is a master at
exploiting the media to generate semiserious discussion of fringy ideas
that would normally be dismissed out of hand.

At various times, Trump has suggested repealing campaign
contribution limits, imposing a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese goods,
and building a “triple-layered fence” and flying Predator drones along
the Mexican border.

Trump’s sideshow routine has become tiresome for some
reporters (BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins compared the experience of covering
the Donald’s short-lived 2014 gubernatorial campaign to “donning a
network-branded parka during a snowstorm and shouting into the camera
about a predictable phenomenon”), but many major news outlets still find
the act irresistible for the ratings and page views. And that begs the
question: Who’s dumber, Donald Trump or the journalists who keep feeding
the troll? — Keegan Hamilton

Blowhard

Oregon Republican Party Chairman Art Robinson

Give the Oregon GOP credit for thinking outside the box.
They could have chosen just any old Tea Partying climate-change denier
as a leader. Instead, they found Art Robinson.

A chemist and newsletter publisher who bases his
operations in Cave Junction, Robinson has been spreading the gospel of
nuclear power and Christian homeschooling since the 1980s. He ran two
losing challenges to U.S. Representative Peter DeFazio — campaigns that
brought fewer votes than headlines about his views on public schools
(they’re child abuse) and nuclear waste (a little exposure is good for
us). He has advocated sprinkling radioactive waste over the ocean from
airplanes to strengthen our immune systems.

Robinson might just be your run-of-the-mill country kook —
Grizzly Adams meets Dr. Strangelove — except his views have tapped a
lucrative vein in the paranoid style of American politics. (He raised
about $1.2 million in each of his congressional races.) That fundraising
power was too much for the cash-strapped state GOP to resist — it
elected him chairman last fall, deciding extremism in pursuit of money
is no vice.

Robinson immediately proved he isn’t shy about asking for
contributions. Weeks after his appointment, he mailed every household in
Josephine County and requested a urine sample. He explained the fluids
would be used in tests that would “improve our health, our happiness,
and prosperity.” — Aaron Mesh, Willamette Week

Blowhard

Clackamas County Chairman John Ludlow, Oregon

Portland, Oregon, may be known in the national
consciousness as a frivolous paradise of banjos, naked bike rides, and
fair-trade coffee. But its suburban commuter communities have nourished a
resentful Republican movement that’s dead serious about stopping what
they call “Portland creep.”

The face of this anti-Portland movement is John Ludlow, a
brawny real estate broker with a shaved head that suggests Lex Luthor as
a high-school sports coach. His bid for Clackamas County chair was
funded by a timber magnate and propelled by a populist revolt against
light rail. Once elected, he set about trying to break contracts the
county had signed years earlier to extend rail lines south from
Portland.

But it’s his demeanor in Clackamas — a largely rural
county of 380,000 that’s becoming more Stepford all the time — that’s
been the most embarrassing. In a planning meeting last summer, he
yelled, “Do you want a piece of me?” at a fellow commissioner.

You can’t say voters weren’t warned. When he ran for
county chair in 2012, lawn signs went up that declared, “John Ludlow is a
bully.” Ludlow had previously been removed from the planning
commissioner in Wilsonville, where he served as mayor, for what one city
councilor called “rude, combative, argumentative, and disrespectful”
behavior toward the public. Ludlow sued, and in 2003 a judge restored
him to his position, ruling his objectionable ways were actually
protected speech.

A personnel complaint filed by the county’s lobbyist in
April claims that, when news broke about the Boston Marathon bombing,
Ludlow declared it was likely the work of “a damn A-rab.” Speculating
about suspects in a local shooting, he allegedly said, “I bet they were
Mexicans.”

And when a former county board member, Ann Lininger, won
appointment to an open state legislative seat this year, Ludlow said she
succeeded because “she does a good job of sticking out her perky
titties in people’s faces.”

Ludlow apologized for his statements while denying making
the comments about the state legislator’s breasts. An investigator
cleared Ludlow of violating any county rules — but added that, when it
came to the “perky titties” comment, Ludlow’s denial was probably a lie.
— Aaron Mesh, Willamette Week

Blowhard

Pennsylvania State Representative Daryl Metcalfe

State Representative Daryl Metcalfe likes to walk softly
and carry a big flamethrower. Whether it’s gay rights, immigration
reform — which he has called “illegal alien invasion” — or requiring
voter ID cards, you can count on the eight-term Republican from western
Pennsylvania to unleash a double dose of inflammatory rhetoric.

As chairman of the powerful House State Government
Committee, Metcalfe authored a controversial voter ID law and then drew
fire when he went on a Pittsburgh radio station to complain about people
who were too “lazy” to apply for the ID card. Then, when newbie state
Representative Brian Sims, the first openly gay lawmaker in Harrisburg,
tried to speak on the house floor last June in support of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act,
Metcalfe relied on his direct connection to the Divine to deny Sims the
right to speak. Metcalfe said Sims’ intended remarks were “in open
rebellion against God’s law.”

The far-right conservative took the limelight in
Harrisburg in 2001 when he introduced a resolution asking the federal
government to fund and deploy a national defense missile system. No one
could figure out why state lawmakers should be debating the issue, but
the measure passed anyway. His latest crusade, launched in May, was to
call on Governor Tom Corbett to appeal a federal court decision that
struck down the ban on same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania. He is
consistent, at least, and he sees himself as being ahead of the curve.
As Metcalfe, 51, told the liberal news website Talking Points Memo: “I
was a Tea Partier before it was cool.” — Lil Swanson, Philadelphia City Paper

Blowhard

U.S. Representative Steve Stockman, Texas

There will soon come a day when Steve Stockman, the U.S.
representative for the 36th District of Texas, will depart his
Washington, D.C. office for the last time and fly home to Southeast
Texas, never to return to the city he so loathes. He probably won’t fire
a celebratory bullet through the Capitol dome. He probably will give it
some consideration.

Because Stockman, if nothing else, is the congressman of
the gun. It began in 1995, during the first year of his initial,
short-lived stint in Congress, when he wrote in Guns and Ammo
that the Clinton administration had orchestrated the siege on David
Koresh’s Waco compound “to prove the need for a ban on so-called
‘assault weapons.’” Oddly, Stockman’s political
career quickly fizzled: He lost his next election. But he resurfaced in
2012 a totally unchanged man.

Less than a month after the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings, he
introduced the Safe Schools Act, which would have repealed federal laws
keeping guns away from schools. He then vowed to pursue the impeachment
of Barack Obama after the president issued minor executive orders
seeking more gun control, which Stockman called “an existential threat
to this nation.”

Occasionally, and memorably, he has exerted himself, with
no NRA puppet strings visible, to fight climate change, sex education,
and, in February 2013, the Violence Against Women Act, which provides
protection to gay and transgender people. “This is helping the liberals,
this is horrible. Unbelievable,” Stockman said. “What really bothers —
it’s called a women’s act, but then they have men dressed up as women,
they count that. Change-gender, or whatever. How is that — how is that a
woman?”

It’s this rhetorical flair that journalists will miss come
next January, when Stockman, after recent failed bids for the Senate
and his House seat, departs Washington again, likely for good this time.
The gun lobby might miss him too, but only until it gets it strings
attached to the new guy. — Joe Tone, Dallas Observer

Blowhard

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas

Stupid is as stupid does, but the problem with Republican
Ted Cruz is that the freshman senator from Texas isn’t stupid. Since
taking Kay Bailey Hutchison’s seat in 2012, he has spent his time
railing against pretty much every other politician from either side of
the aisle. This approach has earned him the loathing of members of his
own party, but it has gotten him tons of attention and made him a
household name.

These are not the moves of a stupid man. It’s a clever
strategy. Cruz has made himself a Tea Party poster child and become a
national political star with clear presidential intentions thanks to his
remarkable talent for spouting off against most of the legislation
anyone proposes (of the almost 500 votes he has cast since being elected
to the Senate, more than half have been nays.)

The height of the Cruz show came when he staged a
nonfilibuster filibuster to take another stand against the Affordable
Care Act, even though the stunt was basically political grandstanding.
Cruz stood there reading Green Eggs and Ham while the rest of Congress tried to make a deal to get the government running again.

It would be comforting to write Cruz and his antics off as
the doings of a not-so-bright politician, but if he were as
one-dimensional and guileless as he pretends to be, he’d be on his way
out, a one-term senator. As it is, he looks to be setting himself up for
a 2016 run at the White House. — Dianna Wray, Houston Press

Blowhard

Washington State Senator Pam Roach

Pam Roach has the temperament of a thunder cloud, with an
in-your-face personality and a penchant for screaming and berating staff
members and fellow lawmakers that once got her banned from Republican
caucus meetings.

Roach, who has represented a conservative suburban
district southeast of Seattle for 24 years, cemented her Rottweilerian
reputation in 2006 when she threw a tantrum after someone removed a
bouquet of roses from her senate floor desk. Rising, red-faced, from her
seat, she bellowed, “I am incensed that anyone would move or touch
anything on a senator’s desk, and I want to find out who took my flowers
and moved them, and I intend to take action.”

Roach has no off switch. She works without a net — and
without a filter. She is constantly gaveled down. Legislative reporters
grab their notepads when she gets up to speak, for who knows what will
come out of her mouth.

On her blog, the Pam Roach Report, she has written, “It is
women like me who pass on the genes we hope our sons have when they go
to Iraq or Afghanistan. It is women like me who do not show fear.” She’s
been reprimanded repeatedly for her tirades and was told on one
occasion to seek professional help after staffers accused her of
illegally obtaining employees’ email messages and brandishing a handgun
at one of them. One Olympia aide said her verbal attacks were
commonplace: “We call it being ‘Roached.’” — Ellis E. Conklin, Seattle Weekly

Blowhard

Wisconsin State Representative Joel Kleefisch

Perhaps Joel Kleefisch, an Oconomowoc Republican, began
feeling a bit eclipsed by his wife Rebecca, a social conservative who
emerged from political obscurity in 2010 to become Governor Scott
Walker’s running mate and Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor. First elected
to the state legislature in 2004, Kleefisch has really come into his
own in the past two years — and not in a good way.

An avid hunter, Kleefisch proposed a hunting season for
sandhill cranes, a federally protected migratory bird, in early 2012.
Anticipating the post-kill feast, he noted that many people describe the
majestic bird as “the rib eye of the sky.”

Kleefisch was also caught plagiarizing in an email to
members of the state senate and assembly regarding his proposal the
Flexibility for Working Families Bill. The email included unattributed
quotes from three congressmen sponsoring the federal measure on which
Kleefisch had based his own proposal.

Then there was his proposal to allow anyone with a permit
to take a concealed weapon onto school grounds. “Eighteen other states
say conceal-carry can carry on school grounds,” he explained. “Wisconsin
is not one of them. It’s time to talk about whether that’s a safer
alternative.”

The idea didn’t gain many fans, even from Kleefisch’s own party, and he pulled it before a committee vote.

Kleefisch made his biggest splash, however, with his
proposal to cap the amount of child support that wealthy parents would
be required to pay. People cried foul when it was reported that Michael
Eisenga, a wealthy businessman and donor to both Rebecca and Joel
Kleefisch, had helped draft the bill after he tried unsuccessfully in
court to reduce his support payments. It also came out that the
millionaire had put his children on the state’s health-care program for
low-income children.

That one did not end well for Kleefisch either. He eventually withdrew the bill, but blamed its demise on “misinformation.” — Judith Davidoff,Isthmus

Blowhard

Wisconsin State Representative Brett Hulsey

You have to hand it to the two-term Democratic state
representative from Madison. Brett Hulsey knows how to grab headlines.
But in his quest for publicity, he has also made himself irrelevant. Not
a great tradeoff.

The former county board supervisor and environmental
consultant almost immediately pissed off his Democratic colleagues in
the state assembly by constantly grandstanding during the chaotic time
after Governor Scott Walker proposed ending collective bargaining rights
for most public workers. Once he even jumped up to the podium at a news
conference to give an impromptu Democratic response to a speech Walker
had just made. His colleagues were not amused.

Then things got weird.

News surfaced in July 2012 that Hulsey had pleaded no
contest to a disorderly conduct charge for flipping off a 9-year-old boy
while both were swimming at a local beach. A little less than a year
later, Hulsey’s legislative aide asked to be reassigned, saying she felt
threatened by her boss’ plan to use a box cutter to show her how to
defend herself.

Hulsey soon after told a reporter that he was going
through a particularly difficult time and was receiving treatment for
posttraumatic stress disorder stemming from childhood abuse.

Knowing his chances to retain his seat were slim to none,
Hulsey didn’t seek re-election. But he didn’t go away either. He threw
his hat into the ring for Wisconsin governor, challenging frontrunner
Mary Burke in the Democratic primary.

In the leadup to the state Republican Party convention,
Hulsey thought it would be a good idea to show up dressed as a
Confederate soldier and to distribute KKK-style hoods to delegates
there. He said he wanted to call attention to the GOP’s alleged racist
policies.

News of his plans drew worldwide attention, none of it
good, and he called off the stunt. But it pretty much burned any
remaining relationships with colleagues who might have still admired his
smart analysis and progressive stance on issues. — Judith Davidoff, Isthmus

User and Boozer

Former Idaho Senator and GOP Majority Caucus Chairman John McGee

John McGee began winning elections before he was 20 years
old and didn’t stop until he became chairman of the Idaho Republican
Majority Caucus — he had become the 21st-century face of what many
people considered the future of the Idaho GOP. But today, at 41, McGee
has had his face plastered on more mug shots than campaign posters and
is considered a political pariah.

Following his June 2011 drunk driving arrest, McGee
admitted to imbibing a bit too much at a Father’s Day golf tournament.
He was also charged with stealing an SUV that night (complete with a
utility trailer) and crashing it in a neighbor’s front yard, prompting a
bathrobe-clad woman to rush to her bedroom window. Police said McGee
emerged from the wreckage, mumbled something about the woman being an
angel, made some passing remarks about driving the stolen vehicle to
Jackpot, Nevada, and promptly passed out.

McGee, who by then was an Idaho state senator, saw that
his political career was hanging in the balance. So he underwent a
series of mea culpa TV interviews in which he spoke in hushed tones
about how eager he was to “move forward.”

But after he retained his Republican leadership and
returned to the Idaho statehouse politically unscathed, it turned out
that some of McGee’s moves were more than forward; they were
inappropriate. A female staffer said he had sexually harassed her on
several occasions at the state capitol. According to the staffer, McGee
exposed himself, asked for sex, and groped the subordinate. He was
sentenced to 90 days in jail, but after 44 days behind bars, he was
released “for good behavior.” He hasn’t been heard from, at least
publicly, since. — George Prentice, Boise Weekly

User and Boozer

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton

In 2000, liberal Democrat Mark Dayton purchased a one-term
U.S. senator gig with $12 million of his inheritance and then
immediately began forging, as the New Republic put it in 2004, a remarkably bipartisan impression inside the Beltway that he was “crazy.” In 2006, Time
named him one of the nation’s five worst senators, and his Capitol Hill
nickname became “the Blunderer.” Dayton cemented his place in
Washington’s cuckoo’s nest in 2004, when he closed his D.C. office and
shooed his entire staff back to the provinces. Dayton explained he had
been credibly, confidentially apprised that the Capitol itself would
shortly be laid waste by terrorists.

Meanwhile, Dayton was adjudged less than zero as a
policymaker, known only for introducing legislation that would create a
cabinet-level position of “Secretary of Peace and Non-Violence.”

He gave himself an “F” when asked by a high school class to grade his Senate performance.

Dayton returned to Minnesota, where he’d always enjoyed
giving unsolicited confessions — that he was a recovering alcoholic,
that he was a medicated lifelong depressive, that he’d begun drinking
again as a senator.

In 2010, again working the politics of pity, he was
elected Minnesota’s governor after spending another $4 million of his
allowance. Yet he had changed. He had morphed into just another
political hack. He played the backroom-in-Brooklyn ward heeler so the
Minnesota Vikings would have their new football stadium. And though he
has gained relief from enough psychotropic drugs to fill a Walgreens
warehouse, he refused to support a medical marijuana bill this spring
because it was opposed by statewide law enforcement, whose support
provided the wafer-thin margin of Dayton’s gubernatorial victory. Yet
there were still signs of the lost, rich doofus who meant well.
Confronted by angry parents demanding medical marijuana for their
children suffering from epilepsy, Dayton suggested they get their weed
on the street, illegally. — Neal Karlen

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